HTC 8X advertised in the Metro UK newspaper

HTC has kicked off its advertising campaign for the Windows Phone 8X, the company's flagship Windows Phone 8 handset, with an advertisement spotted in today's Metro newspaper. Running the latest version of Microsoft's mobile OS, the 8X packs a punch with the latest specifications and included Beats Audio.

It's fairly humorous that the HTC 8X is featured in the Metro newspaper with all the legal trouble Microsoft has had with the 'Metro' branding of its UI. The advert states availability of the handset starting today, which we can confirm with Clove, Expansys and O2 reporting stock of the blue variant, with the former detailing other colours on the way. Phones4u and Carphone Warehouse are still up in the air with websites and employees being none the wiser for the time being.

The advertisement itself is appealing to the eye with the usual HTC backdrop and presentation of hardware. The blue, yellow and black versions are featured, with the absence of red. The blue HTC 8X sports an entire page of the newspaper to highlight a handful of features / specifications. As the headline points out, the HTC 8X is the first Windows Phone to wield Beats Audio, though this may come across as a mere gimmick to many.

We're pleased to see HTC starting to fire up the marketing engine and it'll be interesting to see levels of demand once retailers and carriers follow suit. When Nokia begins pushing handsets to consumers, we should see a combined effort with Microsoft's platform advertising taking effect.

The only OEM left is Samsung. Once the ATIV S hits the stores we'll hopefully see a push from the company to match up to what's being carried out by the competition. Especially since Samsung's flagship Windows Phone 8 handset sports intriguing specifications (16GB with MicroSD slot anyone?)

Hopefully this is better organised than Nokia's "launch" of the Lumia - where it has been complete confusion about who (because of the confusion between EE the brand and EE the network), what and where people can get a Lumia 920 (let's not even get into the colour issue). Now on the 'official' launch day, nobody has the 920 and it looks like it will be the 9th (from EE) and 13th (From P4U) at the earliest).
A mess from start to finish.

It was always said to be doomed as soon as the exclusive partnership with EE was announced. Unfortunately Nokia got into bed with a new network that royally messed their plans up that backfired heavily. It's looking less likely for the OEM to move the handsets under the EE banner, but we're still not sure exactly how long this exclusivity is planned to last.

Ordered the Blue from Expansys. I remember seeing similar posts about the marketing for HTC's WP7.5 phones last year. Print advertisement is unfortunately a very small and not terribly effective way of advertising. I'd like to see more product placement over the holiday period. Let's hope the combined marketing campaigns from the Windows Phone OEMs and Microsoft show some real impact this time.

I also think it is a pity that they don't have something more "iconic". The Verizon tagline for the US was very well done. A good campaign based around that would be killer.

Yeah, HTC did perform the same with the HTC TITAN and Radar, but then dropped off afterwards with little promotion after newspaper advertising took place. We'll have to see how long HTC's effort remains at this level this time round. With the renewed partnership with Microsoft, we're expecting more.